Thursday, July 15, 2010

mother in law's living room reveal: Part II

You can look here for an entire post about what was in the room before, but here is a picture of the living room before:

Can you believe there is a bright red piano behind the love seat, in front of those bookshelves in the far corner??

And here is the living room now:

We worked with all of the original furniture. The piece under the window is formerly the buffet from the dining room.We took out the loveseat and put it in the tv room. The side tables also came out. The chairs were moved from facing the window to either side of the fireplace facing the sofa, creating an easier conversation space.

The red piano used to be against the back of the sofa, but is now turned around facing the wall. All of the giant bookshelves were taken out of the far corner and sold at a garage sale. (The bookshelves surrounding the fireplace remain.). A beautiful gold mirror found on Craigslist hangs over the piano, and it creates almost another window, or a frame of the living room. It also bounces some light around, which is much needed in the living room. We have an electrician scheduled to install some overhead lighting next month.

Home Goods was the source for just about all the accessories that we bought. The artichoke/pineapple thingy are actually bookends, and the painting is of the Italian countryside. The painting has very pretty blues and peaches and rusty browns, which works really well with the colors already in the room. The table underneath we pulled from the hallway.

The blue garden stool and white pillows were from Home Goods.

My mother in law also had a garden stool that she's had for 30 years, and I think the detail and ornateness actually work really well in this setting:

The lamp is (of course, where else) also from Home Goods.

My inlaws found the painting over the fireplace in a thrift store a few years ago. I think they paid $20 for it. The lovely view is actually a painting of the bay of Naples and Mount Vesuvius, where my father in law grew up. Again, the blues and peaches of Italian cityscape goes perfectly with the furnishings already in the room, and the ornate frame reflects my inlaws formal style.

They have a small collection of traditional Italian figurines that we pulled out and placed in a few places around the room. I've always loved the Pulcinella figure (the one eating spaghetti is a stock character from the Comedia Dell'Arte) and hope to find one on our trip to Italy in a few weeks.

Last, I hung a beautiful drawing of my mother in law in her early twenties, drawn by a talented cousin many years ago:

The only projects left in the room are: 1) the bay window sill sustained some damage in the roof leak that wasn't fixed. We stripped the damaged wood off the seat and ceiling and are looking at options for replacing, including wood veneer strips and staining the wood beneath.2) the china cabinet has smoky glass fronts; I'd like to replace that with clear, non-smoky glass.3) the coffee table is all sorts of beat up from my children playing on it. I'm toying with attempting to turn it into a round tufted ottoman. This seems beyond my skill set, but the table can't look much worse than it does now, so it could be a learning project.4) there is still some accessorizing and paring down the books from the bookshelf to do.